YouTube Red and Google Play Music to Merge and Form New Service

Speaking at a panel session for the New Music Seminar conference in New York, YouTube’s Lyor Cohen confirmed that we will see a merging of Google Play Music and YouTube Red, but we don’t know quite when this will take place.

The move shouldn’t shock too many, as Google has been offering both services for the price of one for quite some time. This is the first time we’re hearing about the two officially becoming a single offering, though.

If you aren’t familiar, YouTube Red is simply an ad-free version of YouTube that also allows you to save videos for offline playback. There’s still YouTube Music, which is available to everyone without a subscription, and that doesn’t appear to be changing at all.

Here’s a statement provided by Google to The Verge:

Music is very important to Google and we’re evaluating how to bring together our music offerings to deliver the best possible product for our users, music partners and artists. Nothing will change for users today and we’ll provide plenty of notice before any changes are made.

Again, folks who pay for either service are already getting the other for free, so it’s hard to say exactly what will change when the merge happens. And as Google claims, they will provide plenty of notice before anything changes.